The bane of traditional computing was the inelasticity of computing resources. It was impossible to scale up or scale down resource usage in synchronization with rising and falling demand. The cloud has changed the world for businesses. The Auto-scaling feature of cloud applications (such as cloud backup and recovery, mobile cloud) allows users to add or remove resources “on demand” and scale up or scale up the resource deployment in accordance with the need of the business automatically, smoothly, and efficiently.

The auto-scaling feature of cloud software is a configurable component that allows users to trigger a scale up or down with alerts and alert escalations. Once configured and set up, pre-defined or monitored conditions create reactions to usage threshold excesses or falls.

Auto-scaling feature is extremely useful for organizations that are unsure of the data volumes that they may generate over a period of time and how much cloud backup and storage they will be initiating over the year. The cloud backup and recovery software is architected to handle sudden spikes of traffic instantly and will draw in additional computing resources that you can pay for as you go on with your business without a pause.

Since different businesses have different kinds of requirements, auto-scaling features are differentiated. Some cloud backup/computing software allows users to scale up on the basis of the number of incoming requests. For instance, the storage space available will be scaled up if the data transfer or data requests peek; and scaled down if there is a fall. Others offer load based scaling or a time based scaling.

Load based scaling is a scale up or scale down that is determined by the number of jobs in the queue. In time based scaling, the scaling up or down is based on how long a job has been in queue.

As a result, businesses have the right scale of computing resources and cloud backup repositories at all times. It makes the business agile and the business applications elastic. Cloud backup fluctuations or number of users hitting the business website ceases to be a matter of concern. The business has the luxury to anticipate, plan and organize the extent of computing resources they will need and deploy according to the time of the day, the season, a specific promotion campaign or with unexpected flash website hits.